Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 966 posts

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#361

Post by eru »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #294
roenxi wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a moment I disagreed with this, so I'll add a link to the OSD [0] for anyone else who wants to quibble. Also a choice quote about Stallman [1]: "Richard Stallman argues the obvious meaning of term "open source" is that the source code is public/accessible for inspection, without necessarily any other rights granted" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ope…

Stallman is about Free/Libre Software. Eric S. Raymond is about Open Source. There are somewhat subtle, but very important differences between their philosophies.

And not even all Free Software is the same.

Eg the Linux kernel deliberately uses GPL 2, and that community has rejected GPL 3.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#362

Post by orlandohill »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #301
solatic wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the person who wrote the software and owns the copyright, nothing prevents you from dual-licensing your software. You can release your software as GPL on GitHub, with a notice that you're willing to also license your code under a paid proprietary license; interested parties may send an email to sales@example.com at their leisure. Do note that this effectively prevents other people from collaborating with you, sinc…

There must be a way to expand the GPL to allow for dual licensing contributed content. You could also share revenues, to incentivize developers to join. I'm not sure how that would be possible in an effective and transparent way though.

You don't need to expand the license, just ask contributors to sign a contributor license agreement.

https://indieopensource.com/public-private/contributors

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#363

Post by nmfisher »

eru wrote: post #359
nmfisher wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is a fairly trivial loophole to close if you have a lawyer who knows what they're doing. In fact, you don't even need to close the loophole. You just need to make FAANG employees pause long enough to worry that they might not comply, deterring them from using said library.

If you don't want FAANG employees to use your code, why don't you just forbid them?

Agreed, this is a perfectly acceptable solution too.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#364

Post by nmstoker »

My experience is reasonably narrow but it strikes me that whilst this scenario is frustrating for Marek, an overall worse issue comes from naive time wasters being disruptive with issues. It's a balance and one shouldn't have unrealistic expectations of the pubic but lots of the culprits seem to combine a poor understanding of software basics and ridiculous expectations for what they could do with a project, for how little effort they can put into it and how much service they think they ought to get from maintainers and contributors.

Some form of screening would be handy and whilst I welcome efforts GitHub and other tools provide to nudge people in the right direction it seems more could be done.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#365

Post by orlandohill »

3pt14159 wrote: post #63
ganafagol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps…

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don…

Check out the Polyform Project's Small Business License. It has a threshold of 100 employees and contractors, and 1,000,000 USD in annual revenue.

Of course, the OSI's Open Source Definition precludes these kinds of restrictions, so it isn't "open source" by that definition.

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0/

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#366

Post by icebraining »

robinduckett wrote: post #239
arthurcolle wrote: post #102

On Twitter, he claims that he was recently made homeless due to an apartment fire, and asks the community to send funds to help him avoid homelessness, which seems reasonable enough. He later goes on to describe "fake news written by the NY Post." I searched for this, and found an article that might be the article he describes (timing fits) [0] Pretty crazy story, all in all! He seems to be in some pretty dire strait…

I mean if we're sharing stories: "I started a project to learn javascript and node.js through rap," Nodejitsu co- founder and New York expat Marak Squires" I think he is terrible at being frugal, spent all his money, and is now begging for handouts.

Starting a company doesn't make one rich. There's no evidence he had any significant money to spend. In fact, it's likely the founders got nothing after the VCs were paid off.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#367

Post by tnli »

adwn wrote: post #41
lacker wrote: post #28

I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue. It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the…

> Just change the license if you don't want to license it freely to big companies! Marak doesn't want to prevent big companies from using his (?) code, he's saying that he won't support them for free anymore. Read the Github issue again, carefully.

I find that those companies that add issues and support requests _ought_ to have the decency to also donate to him.

But, I guess, companies don't have any decency to donate unrequested, so maybe he should put up some sort of notice to request payment for any work they request from him. Oh, wait...

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#368

Post by DoreenMichele »

I know a couple of comments have mentioned this already, but this apparently grows out of him being in a pickle financially at the moment and resenting the time he has put into doing free work: https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

I'm sympathetic. I don't have any funds to spare to help him out. I'm chronically broke myself.

I've done lots of nice things for people over the years for free. A lot of the things I'm good at are inherently hard to monetize (most moderating positions are unpaid, for example).

I was homeless for years. I still write about homelessness and try to provide other forms of support for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

Some of the things that would help:

1. Universal health care coverage in the US. ("free"/provided by the government)

2. Fix our housing policy issues such that more small housing in walkable neighborhoods becomes available.

If those two things were done, a single adult could potentially support themselves on part-time minimum wage work while renting a single room until they get back on their feet. That's currently not feasible.

I am not against open source. (I just submitted my first pull request to open source a few hours ago.) But I do recognize that there are systemic issues and we need to make it easier for people to make their lives work so they don't wind up all pissed off over what they have done for free when something goes sideways.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#369

Post by eru »

tingol wrote: post #316
cercatrova wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want usage, you can make it MIT and then suffer while they capitalize your code (as they are with in their rights to do), or if you want protection but low usage, make it AGPL or proprietary even. I don't really see a scenario where you have high usage, high prot…

What's the point you're making? There's a lot of proprietary software that's - high usage - high protection - high profit What's the argument that OSS software (which you could use for free indefinitely until you gain profitability) is somehow not capable of the same?

There's even more software that's not used much at all.

Going open source is one of the ways to increase your chances of increased usage.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#370

Post by eru »

rusk wrote: post #254
majewsky wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> educational and nonprofit purposes > once you start to make money So if a nonprofit uses that software to sell services (they gotta fund their expenses after all), does that count? Seriously. With vague phrasing like this, you're gonna have a bad time. Contracts are that verbose for a reason.

That’s why it’s all rights reserved. If you want to use it to make money you have to ask me. In the scenario you describe is probably say that’s okay, but like I say it’s up to me and only me, at the end of the day. This of course means it’s not open to the kind of free-form open collaboration that typifies Open Source but if anything this just goes to show how more restrictive licences such as GPL actually promote i…

The GPL is perhaps restrictive than the license you suggested.

It's definitely more predictable.

Post reply on HN